


To Heal

by Celia_and



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Office, Anger, Annulment, Antagonism, Ben unconsciously punches Rey during a PTSD-induced night terror, Break Up, Confrontations, Death-related imagery, Domestic Fluff, Domestic Violence, End of Marriage, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Falling In Love, Feeding, First Meetings, Flashbacks, Freckles, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, Heavy Angst, Marriage, Mental Health Issues, Military Backstory, Missionary Position, Night Terrors, Nightmares, No Pregnancy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reconciliation, Smut, Unsafe Sex, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:28:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27464209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celia_and/pseuds/Celia_and
Summary: The haze of pain was bad enough, in those interminable days when she lay on the floor by the bed that used to be theirs. But the worst part was the new paper that came bearing his signature: the one that said that he hadn’t even filed for divorce.Annulment. He wasn’t saying their marriage was over. He was saying it never existed.----------When CEO Rey Palpatine faces down her rival Ben Solo across a boardroom table, it’s been ten years since she’s seen him. Ten years since they belonged to each other.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 256
Kudos: 1260
Collections: Galactic Idiots Collection, Ijustfellintothissendhelp





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BensCalligraphySet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BensCalligraphySet/gifts).



> I used the “heavy angst” tag on this one for a reason. It’s going to be rough. Please, please mind the tags! 💛
> 
> This story is based on a prompt from [Fran](https://twitter.com/galacticidiots) on Twitter, which was in turn inspired by a photo prompt by [@adambsolodriver](https://twitter.com/adambsolodriver):
> 
> _Palpatine Corp is planning a hostile takeover of Skywalker Industries. A meeting is set up to discuss terms. Their teams sit Ben & Rey down. Everyone is tense. Rey’s CFO, Hux, raises an eyebrow. _
> 
> _“When were you going to tell us that you were married for two months during college?”_

The boardroom is glass and steel. Glass like his eyes as he looks through her. Steel like her voice as she shakes his hand.

“Mr. Solo.”

“Ms. Palpatine.”

His hand is bigger than it is in her memory. _He’s_ bigger than he is in her memory, and he looms large enough there. She thought she was prepared for this: the nearness. But she’d forgotten to realize that he might smell just the same as he used to. She can be forgiven the lapse, she thinks. Because who still smells the same after a decade?

She doesn’t teeter in her stilettos, though, not once, as she walks around the excessively large table to sit opposite him. With Hux at her elbow and the city at her back. She sits up even straighter in her chair and plants her elbows on the table. Companies ten times the size of Ben’s have fallen to her, crumpled in the inevitable face of progress and power. His is nothing. He is nothing.

Her body is wrapped in money. It cradles her torso and skims her thighs and pinches her feet. It clings to her perfect fingernails and tousles her perfect hair and rings her perfectly smoky eyes. It doesn’t get to touch her freckles, though. Those are hers.

They used to be his, too.

“Shall we get started?” Hux prompts.

She clears her throat and looks down at the papers in front of her. The words swim, but she knows what they say. She looks up. “It’s unclear to me why this meeting was requested. Everything is in order. I’ve dotted the i’s myself. All that’s missing, Mr. Solo, is a little something at the bottom of page twenty-eight. It’s a small matter, in my view, but my legal team insists on it for some reason.” She stares him down. “Your signature.”

Ben doesn’t react. His CFO cuts in. “Excuse me, Ms. Palpatine, as you know, this matter cannot be concluded without Mr. Solo’s agreement, and we have some very serious reservations regarding—”

Ben silences him with a raised hand. But he doesn’t speak. He just looks at her like he’s trying to memorize her and needs silence to do it. Or maybe he’s trying to find her under all the layers of money.

“It’s strictly a formality, I assure you,” she says. “Since we both know your signature doesn’t mean anything.”

Ben flinches, almost imperceptibly.

Hux clears his throat. “I think it might be beneficial to address the elephant in the room.”

Rey’s eyes never leave Ben’s. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m referring to the fact that the two of you were married.”

She flushes as she glares at her CFO. “I hardly think—”

“Can we have a minute?” Ben’s voice cuts in. Strong and steady, and unless she’s mistaken, sad. Like a goodbye. The one they never had.

She hesitates.

“Just a minute.” Quietly.

She nods. She stands up and turns toward the window as they’re left alone. The door shuts with an echo. The room is too big for two people but too small for everything between them.

* * *

The lecture hall was big. Big enough that she didn’t notice him until the fourth class. But once she did notice him, she couldn’t stop. Tall and quiet, with ears that stuck out from underneath his dark hair. He was self-conscious about them, she thought. While he took notes he would fiddle with them or cup his hand over them or tug on his hair like tugging would make it grow faster, fast enough that she wouldn’t be able to see them stick out from where she sat four rows behind him.

There was no way he was single, she told herself. That would be far too good to be true. Life had never given her anything good, so why would it suddenly now give her the very best thing? One day her bag’s seam split as she picked it up at the end of class, as if to rub it in. She knelt down to retrieve her books and reach for her pen where it had rolled underneath the dirty, dusty seats, and she bumped her head on the edge of a desk and life had her down and was just kicking and kicking and then she looked up and he was there, crouching beside her. Gathering up her things like it was his job as much as hers. Four hands, instead of two.

He pulled a bungee cord out of his bag and wrapped it around hers. He didn’t mind when she cried. He sat on the dirty, dusty floor next to her, and when her tears slowed to a hiccup he stood up and reached down with both hands to help her up, and he bought her coffee and then she bought him lunch and then he skipped his last class of the day to come to her apartment so she could kiss him and pull off his clothes and push him down on the bed and kiss him some more. And so he could flip them over and undress her gently, softly, and cup her head with his big hand on the pillow as he taught her body what it was like to have his inside. And when she cried this time, the tears were happy.

She forgot to ask his name until after, when she lay beside him in the gold of the setting sun.

“Ben,” he said.

“What’s your full name?”

“Benjamin Solo.”

She smiled at him and he swiped the freckles by her nose with his thumb and kissed them, and she told him about the parents that left her and the family she didn’t have. And he folded her up in his arms and she thought it might not be so bad to belong to him, if he belonged to her too.

He told her his life too that evening, sitting at the kitchen table. The story of a lonely child and an angry teenager and a uniform, with hair buzzed short in desert sun. _Teapot,_ they called him, for the handles on either side of his head. He stayed so long he almost forgot how to be human, and when he realized that he was forgetting he came home, to a place that was even less home than it had been before the sand and the sweat and the dog tag that used to be his friend and the ringing in his ears from explosions that ripped time and space.

She held him through the terrors that night. She left the light on and kissed his temples when he cried and cradled him when his eyes glazed and his mind left to go somewhere she couldn’t pull him out from, she could only hold him and wait for him to come back. And he did.

He came back to her.

And he kissed her hands and he kissed her shoulders and he told her it was okay, she could sleep now, it was his turn for the watch. And when the morning came he kissed her awake and she climbed into his lap, into his arms, with her legs astride him so she could ride his cock with a slow wet languor that allowed for hands and arms and mouths and him buried so far inside that they forgot how to be two separate people.

He trembled as he came with a single quiet cry, never looking away from her eyes. And she wrapped herself around him and stroked his hair and when she told him, “I love you, Benjamin Solo,” she meant it.

That’s the name that he signed on the piece of paper at the courthouse three months later—the one that was going to make them belong to each other. She wore a white thrift store dress and he helped guide her hand to the line where she was supposed to sign because she couldn’t see it through her tears. And he held her as she cried in the hallway afterward and she was so happy it scared her.

They went to brunch at a little diner, and she snuggled into his side in the corner booth and he fed her strawberries and kissed her freckles and she laughed as she licked whipped cream off the tip of his nose, and all the joy in the world was in that diner that morning. Sitting in that corner booth.

The shadowy nighttime terrors didn’t relent. She thought that if she loved him hard enough and long enough, she could make them go away. But still he thrashed and screamed and cried and she held him and tried to wake him up, to pull him back from that place that she couldn’t follow. And when he finally clawed his way out he would sit the rest of the night with the light on, digging his back into the metal bars of the headboard so sleep couldn’t drag him back down. He terrified himself.

He tried to convince her that he should sleep on the couch, but she wouldn’t hear of it, because who would hold him when the demons came? And besides, he was her husband. He belonged in their bed because he belonged to her, because they had gotten dressed up and gone to the courthouse and signed that piece of paper that said so. And he couldn’t take it back.

He cooked for her and bought carnations and baby’s breath to put in the chipped glass in the middle of the kitchen table, because they were the cheapest flowers and even though his GI checks could buy tulips, they were saving up for a little house with a washing machine and a fence for a dog and a fireplace mantle for frames to hold a family of two.

Poverty with him was no poverty at all, because he somehow figured out how to make rice and beans taste like a feast, and besides, no amount of money could buy his smile over a carnation bouquet.

She had almost gotten used to the two-month-old ring on her finger the night that she hadn’t held him tightly enough, the night that his unconscious fist collided with her cheekbone so hard that stars burst behind her eye in a firework of agony. When he surfaced he found her in the bathroom with a bag of frozen peas, trying to put on enough makeup that he wouldn’t see.

She wept as she clung to him, trying to stop the hands that packed his things up in bags, but he gently detached her and went on packing, and she knelt on the bed and sobbed so hard she thought her lungs would tear.

And when he was finished, she couldn’t stop crying enough to even see his face as he cradled her undamaged cheek in a big hand and silently kissed her hair.

And when he left, he didn’t come back.

The haze of pain was bad enough, in those interminable days when she lay on the floor by the bed that used to be theirs. But the worst part was the new paper that came bearing his signature: the one that said that he hadn’t even filed for divorce.

 _Annulment._ He wasn’t saying their marriage was over. He was saying it never existed. He’d gotten a doctor to say that his mental illness was an insurmountable impediment at the time of their marriage, so his signature on that piece of paper in that courthouse didn’t count. They had never belonged to each other.

The pain finally subsided enough that she could feel the anger, too. She clung to it. It helped her stand up and get dressed and go to the registrar’s office and arrange for an “incomplete” on her transcript for the classes that kept on going while her world was lying broken on her bedroom floor. And she took those courses again in the summer and the fall and by the time her twenty-first birthday came in December she was back on track to graduate on time, and she tried not to think about his twenty-sixth birthday two days later, or how they would have celebrated their almost-joint birthdays in bed, with cupcakes from a $1 boxed mix and vanilla icing dabbed on her nipples so he could suck it off as she giggled and moaned.

She cried that night, and she was angry at herself for crying, and she took that anger and added it to the rest, stacked up higher and higher around the deep well of tears until she had enough to seal it off entirely.

And everything she did after—her graduation, and her first job, and the one after that, and her coldly elegant condo with no yard and no fence and no mantle, and the six figures that became seven, and the seven that became eight—it was all a way of telling the Ben in her head to go fuck himself.

She wore her money like armor. It protected her well. So well that she was sure that ten years was more than enough time. She could descend on his family’s company and dismember it with no sentiment beyond the satisfaction of having done her job and done it well. And then she could go home to a penthouse and Egyptian cotton sheets on a bed that’s never been anyone’s but hers, because she doesn’t belong to anyone, and she never has.

She has it in writing.

* * *

When she turns back around, he hasn’t moved. Still in his chair, still watching her.

She crosses her arms. “Well?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note the increased chapter count! 😁
> 
> @reylocrumbsart on Twitter made this astounding [artwork](https://twitter.com/reylocrumbsart/status/1325814705940623361) illustrating the first chapter, and I’m in awe.

“Why are you doing this, Rey?”

His hair is longer now. Long enough to cover his ears. He’s dressed in money too, but he doesn’t wear it defiantly like she does. Probably because he grew up with it. The rice and beans and carnations were an anomaly for him. He has nothing to prove.

“It’s good business.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“Why do you care, anyway?”

He cocks his head. “Why do I care that you’re forcibly acquiring my company?”

She tightens her arms across her chest. “It’s not your company. It’s your uncle’s.”

He glances around the room. “Like this company is your grandfather’s.”

She scoffs.

His eyes are surprisingly sincere. “I’m glad you found your family, after all.”

She turns around, facing the window. “I didn’t.”

There’s a long pause. “I don’t understand.”

She swallows. “He wasn’t my grandfather. When he saw my potential and kept promoting me, he knew people would talk. They’d question why a twenty-something woman was being made senior VP, then CEO. People would think I was fucking him. They wouldn’t believe I got here on my own merit. So he decided on the long-lost granddaughter story. To justify why I’m so good at what I do: because it’s in my blood.”

“Jesus,” Ben exhales shakily behind her. “I had no idea.”

“No one does.” The sun glints off a neighboring building into her eyes.

“But you told me,” he says quietly.

She looks down. “Are you going to tell anyone?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I’m sorry. That it’s a lie.”

She picks at an invisible thread on her suit jacket. “Yeah, well, surprise! Misogyny exists, so—”

“No,” he cuts her off. His voice has moved, like he’s walking around the table. She doesn’t turn around. “I’m sorry he wasn’t your family.”

“I’m not. He was kind of an asshole.”

“Rey.” His voice is soft and near. “I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying that,” she snaps.

“I’m sorry.”

She brushes her hair away from her eye with a manicured hand. “What for, exactly?”

“You know what.”

“I want to hear you say it.” She doesn’t know if she can feel his breath on her neck or if it’s just her imagination.

“I’m sorry for leaving. The way I did. And for trying to deal with my shit alone, and failing. And for thinking I was doing the noble thing by hurting you. And for another thing too, Rey.”

She can feel how close he is. Because of the proximity of his voice, yes, but also for the same reason that she’s been so viscerally aware of his presence ever since he entered the room. Like her cells remember their other half and they’re vibrating with the pull to rejoin it.

She rubs her thumb shakily across her forehead. “I can’t do this. They’re waiting for us.”

“Do you want me to sign it?” he asks quietly. “I can just sign it now and leave. If that’s what you want.”

She doesn’t answer.

The light on the city is gold. She thinks of him most often in this hour: the one that was theirs, that first day of her life, when he first touched her freckles and kissed them. The gold smooths and softens everything, even the most piercing point in this city of sharp edges.

She should have had them schedule the meeting in the morning instead. But now they’re here in the gold and she’s afraid. She’s terrified that there exists no measure of molten gold that can soften her: the sharpest edge of all. And the air-tight wall of anger will never crumble, or even if it does, the woman that he loved was shut up inside, so if she finally succeeds in dislodging the bricks she’ll find only a carcass of a memory rotting at the bottom of a dry well.

She could turn to him—she could bury her face in his chest and make him believe that that woman is still on the earth. For a little while, at least. He would realize eventually that his wife is dead. And the brittle, tearless shell that remains has just enough love left over not to hurt him in that way. Because those few scraps of love still clinging to the barbed wire of her soul, she’ll spend on him.

“Yes,” she says evenly. “I want you to sign it.”

She can hear the scribble of the pen behind her. There’s a rustle of paper, then a gentle _clunk_ as he sets the pen down.

“Why did you bring me here?” he asks quietly. “Was it just for the apology?”

“You were the one who asked for this meeting.”

“You intended me to ask for this meeting. You knew the terms were unreasonable and you wrote them in anyway.”

“They must not have been. Because you just agreed to them.”

His voice is dangerously close. “The CEO of Skywalker Industries didn’t just sign that contract, Rey. _I_ did. Don’t pretend this isn’t me and you.”

“It’s not. It’s business.”

She can hear how tired he is, even from the one word. “Okay.”

“What was the other thing?” she asks, turning around.

“What?”

“You said there was another thing you wanted to apologize for.”

His Adam’s apple bobs. “You wouldn’t want to hear it. I hoped that you would, but I don’t think you do, so it would be selfish of me to say.”

“Fine,” she says dryly. It doesn’t much matter.

She’s seen him once more, at least, and that’s all she wanted, right? When she was writing the contract that she knew would bring him? She never wanted anything except his defeat—so much sweeter in person. And she even got his apology. Or part of it, anyway.

She never saw it coming: the terror that claws her chest as he turns to go. Because as long as he had a company she could take over, there was something to work towards, something to look forward to. Not a hope, because hope doesn’t exist, but a possibility. A something.

Now he’s leaving, he’s walking around the table and out the door, and he’s not even looking back.

He could have given her that.

* * *

The only reason she doesn’t go to Hux’s office is because she knows he’ll come to hers. She has him trained well.

His head appears in the doorway. “Ms. Palpatine?”

She leans back in her chair. “How did you find out?”

He steps cautiously inside. “I ordered a thorough background check on their executive team. Like I do for every acquisition.”

“Who else knows?”

Hux smirks. “I gave the investigator significant financial incentive to forget.”

She sets her elbows on the armrests and tents her fingers. Her voice is icy quiet. “I’m fascinated as to what possible reason you could have had for volunteering that information in that room rather than coming to me first.”

Hux stands his ground. “I didn’t feel the need to address it with you, since I assumed it wouldn’t affect the way you handled the meeting.”

Her nostrils flare. “I had it under control.”

“With respect, Ms. Palpatine, I disagree.”

“Go home. And consider yourself lucky if you still have a job tomorrow.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He turns to go, but stops. “Oh.” He pulls a slip of paper from his jacket pocket and approaches her desk to hold it out to her. “You left this at your seat in the boardroom. It was stuck in between the pages of the contract.”

She glances down at it: a small notepad-sized sheet with scribbled handwriting. “It’s not mine.”

Hux places it deliberately on the desk. “I think it is.”

She waits until he’s left and closed the door behind him to pick it up. She hates how her heart leaps at the sight of that handwriting.

An address. Nothing else.

She turns the note over a second time to check, as if there might be some magic time-delayed ink that would explain him to her, and what he is and what he wants and why her life only seemed to mean anything for the five months of it she spent being his.

She turns off her computer and her light and has security call her driver, and he’s waiting by the time the elevator dings the garage level, and she goes home.

Her bag echoes in the dark penthouse when she drops it inside the door. She kicks her heels off and doesn’t bother to turn on any lights, just flicks the switch for the gas fireplace.

Its glow is blue and uniform and artificial. Nothing like the messiness of true fire. Its only concession to conflagration is the flickering tips of the flames that briefly flash yellow before disappearing into the dark nothingness above. She shrugs her jacket off and sits down on the hardwood, wrapping her arms around her shins. Maybe if she sits here long enough she could disappear into nothingness. Maybe she could nod off to the hypnotic flame and wake up ten years ago. If she could just kiss him once before she was whisked back to the present—that’s all she asks.

She rests her chin on her knees.

She never used to appreciate it, not really. Kissing him. Being kissed by him. It had all happened too quickly. They didn’t date. One moment they weren’t in love and the next moment they were, and within a day his body was as much hers as it was his, and so she took it for granted. Being allowed to kiss him.

She remembers their last kiss, at least. They hadn’t had sex that night. She was writing a paper and he was researching mortgage requirements, and it was eleven o’clock before they knew it, so they climbed in bed and he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her forehead. She’d grunted and turned up her face to his so he could kiss her mouth, and he had, quickly and softly. And then he reached over and turned off the bedside lamp, and she fell easily asleep beside him not knowing that she’d just kissed her husband for the last time. The man she’d thought was her husband.

If she hadn’t been crying so hard when he’d finished packing, she could have kissed him then.

Maybe if the kiss had been good enough he wouldn’t have left.

She turns her head to the side, away from the light. She rests her cheek on her knee and tightens her arms around her shins. She tries to remember what it felt like to be able to cry.

It boggles her mind, now, how easy it used to be. Whether happy or sad, or frustrated, or angry, that well was ever-present, always ready to overflow. Physiological proof of the kind of emotion that made a body into a human being.

She wasn’t a pretty crier. Her eyes would turn red and her face would scrunch up and her cheeks would get blotchy. She used to think he didn’t mind. She didn’t know exactly when she realized that he loved it. How ready her body was to share her feelings with him. He used to joke that their sex wasn’t over until she’d come three times and he’d kissed tears off her cheeks. “I can’t help it!” she’d protest, and sniffle and smile and squirm in his arms. “I just feel a lot of things!”

His chest would rumble when he chuckled. That’s why she liked to lie on it. One of the reasons, anyway. Also because he was big and warm and when he tucked her head under his chin and made a circle of biceps to keep her in she didn’t mind that her parents didn’t want her.

She can never decide if those five months were better than nothing at all or much, much worse.

Maybe the only thing worse than five months is five months and one night. Because if there’s a Rey who yet lives in his mind, softer and kinder and with kissable tears on her cheeks, the one night would kill the illusion of her. That Rey whose teeth aren’t fangs.

She could sit on the floor all night, until her tailbone creaked and the first blush of dawn crept shyly through the windows and she could make believe the sunrise was for her. But she didn’t come so far without discipline, so she sensibly eats dinner and sensibly takes a shower and sensibly puts on her black hypoallergenic silk pajamas and sensibly brushes her teeth and sensibly moisturizes her hands and face and sensibly climbs into bed.

She always lies right in the middle, because she can.

Slightly less sensible is her utter inability to fall asleep. She awaits sleep impatiently, not thinking about the scrap of notepaper in her bag. Not thinking about the way he still hesitates on his lowercase r’s, putting an extra divot in their swoop. Certainly not thinking about the memorized address. Or the way his hair fell over his ears, or how she didn’t get to see them. Or the way he looked. Or the way he looked at her.

Least sensible of all is the text she sends at 2:48 a.m. to her car service, and the empty bed at 2:49.

If she can’t sleep, neither should he.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All my thanks for your day-brightening comments and love. ❤️


	3. Chapter 3

There’s a light on in the brownstone when the car pulls up: the only light on the block. Maybe he’s not asleep either.

She pulls the cardigan she’d thrown on over her pajamas tighter around her and gets out. She stands at the foot of the steps for a moment, before she realizes that the driver is waiting for her to get inside safely. The light that spills through the beveled glass panes in the door is gold.

She lets the knocker fall twice. It only takes him a few seconds to answer. He pulls the door open silently, without surprise. Perhaps this was inevitable: a man and a woman and a nighttime almost as dark as the hurt.

She steps inside.

He’s wearing sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt. It looks soft. So do his eyes. She wouldn’t know anything about that. They stand without words in the entryway—him looking at her, her looking at his shirt. Her nipples strain for want of him. _He’s right there,_ they say, _so why isn’t he touching us?_

He could be. She could take off her sweater and silently step out of her pants, and she could push down his sweatpants and take him by the cock and pull him to the wall behind her, next to the coat rack. And she could turn and press her hands against the wall on tiptoes and arch her back so when he entered her she could slide his hands from her hips up under silk to pebbled buds, and he could knead her tits as he fucked her so hard it knocked tears loose.

The least realistic part of her fantasy is the tears.

“You came,” he says dazedly, looking like he’s still trying to figure out if she’s a dream.

“Are we going to stand here or what?”

“No.” He hastens to move to the living room. She follows, leaving her flats in the entryway. He gestures stiffly to the couch. “Please.”

She wraps her sweater closer as she sits. He lowers himself slowly into the armchair opposite. She crosses her arms and legs into a pretzel of protection.

“So?” she asks.

“What?”

“You left me your address. Were you going to say something, or...”

He shifts in his chair. “I hadn’t really thought that far.”

“Maybe I should go.”

“No!” he exclaims. “No. Please.”

She frowns and waits for him.

“You’re wearing pajamas,” he observes finally.

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“I know, I just—” He rubs his hand over his eyes. “You look... beautiful. You look beautiful. You’re here. Fuck, I—” He springs up from his chair and comes to kneel on the floor in front of her. She recoils, but he spreads his hands in a conciliatory gesture. She draws further in on herself, inching away so he doesn’t cut himself on the barbed wire.

He looks up at her. “Can I ask you something?”

“Well?”

“Was part of the reason you made a plan to dismantle my company so you could see me again?”

She looks away, and her eyes fall on a dark wooden bookcase built into the wall, stuffed and overflowing with books. Evidence of a life. He really _lives_ here, not just exists. They could have lived, the two of them. “What if I did?”

His inhale is sharp. “If you did, then I could tell you the other thing that I’m sorry for.”

“Fine,” she breathes, turning back to him. It’s only after she does that she realizes: if she didn’t want to love him, she shouldn’t have looked. “Tell me.”

“I’m sorry I let you go a single day of the past ten years thinking that I didn’t love you. That I wasn’t yours, every piece of me, every second of my life.”

That solid wall of anger is unsteady, suddenly. She reels.

“I’m not asking anything. I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness. But I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t tell you. I know how brilliant you are, Rey, but just in case you haven’t already figured it out. How much I adore you. That I’ll always belong to you, even if you don’t want me. I’ve only lied with one signature in my life, and it wasn’t on our marriage certificate. And if you want to rip apart my company, please do it, sweetheart. If it will make you happy, you can have anything of mine to destroy. I deserve it all. But even if you tear every piece of me and my life to shreds and the only thing left is my heart bleeding on a boardroom floor, it’ll still be yours.”

He takes a deep breath. “That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

The Rey he knew would cry. But the Rey on his sofa can’t, and she yearns to rip apart the bricks of anger and the mortar of time to get to the tears.

She turns away.

“It’s not me,” she whispers to the bookcase, and clears her throat. “That’s not me. The woman you want to tell that to.” She rubs her ear, never looking at him.

He doesn’t get up from his knees. He presses on, undaunted. “I’ve had a long time to think about all the reasons I hate your parents for leaving you. I could fill a book with them, sweetheart. But there’s one that’s worse than all the rest, because they didn’t teach you what every human is supposed to know. How to be loved unconditionally. _Unconditionally,_ Rey, don’t you get it?”

He reaches out for her and she shies away.

“You think that I’ll only love you if you do something, or don’t do something, or are or aren’t a certain way. There’s no _because_ in my love. You exist, so I love you.”

She shakes her head and closes her eyes, like maybe if he’s gone from the corner of her vision his voice will stop saying these impossible, wonderful, terrible things.

“I know I’m doing this all wrong, sweetheart. Shit. God damn it. It’s just, you came here, and you let me say things, and I need you to know. I love you. I love you.”

“You _left_ me,” she spits, whirling on him. “You were... _everything,_ and then you were just _gone._ You _left.”_

He bows his head and takes them: all the blades from her mouth.

“Do you know how long I lay on that fucking floor, Ben? _Do you?_ You said we weren’t married, and the rest of my life, every time I fill out a form, I can’t even check the box that says ‘divorced.’ Because _you_ said our marriage wasn’t real, when I thought it was the realest thing, and you _left_ me.” She gropes wildly for the words to make him know. But she finds none but these. _“You left me.”_

They come in a strangled whisper, and she buries her face in her hands and brings her knees up to her chin and turns away from him, into the corner of the sofa, crammed into a sharp, hot jumble of agony.

There’s nothing she wouldn’t give for tears.

The cushion dips as he sits behind her. Not touching. She burrows farther away.

“I know, sweetheart. I know.”

She shakes her head violently, because he _doesn’t_ know, and how _dare_ his voice be so soft and soothing.

“I was wrong, love. I was trying not to hurt you in a way that couldn’t be repaired. My brain was lying to me the whole time I was with you, telling me I wasn’t sick in a way that I could get better from, that I was broken for good. And it was only a matter of time before I broke you too. And by the time I realized that it was all a lie—that I _could_ get better—it was too late. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Her voice is muffled against her palms. “If your brain was lying to you, how do you know you even loved me?”

“I knew. I _know._ That’s the only thing that’s always been real, this whole time.”

“Why couldn’t you at least leave sooner? If you were always going to go.”

“I was weak, Rey. I needed as much of you as I could store up. So I took you like medicine, and that wasn’t fair to either of us and I knew it, but you were _it,_ you were my person, so I kept telling myself it would all work out, that there was some justice or order in the universe. And then I woke up and found you in the bathroom with that makeup and I wanted to die. I wanted my heart to stop beating if it could mean that I had never hurt you. And I knew that I’d stayed too long.”

She turns impulsively to him and clutches his shirt with both hands. “But what if you had slept a little longer, and I’d been able to put the makeup on in time? Do you think you would have wanted to stay then?”

“Oh.” She watches the realization descend, and she doesn’t even know what it is, just that it settles on him like the heaviest weight. “Rey. You think I was looking for a reason to leave.”

She looks down at his chest and plucks at his shirt and says, in a voice too small to be hers, “Well, I mean, you could have stayed, stayed with me, but I was too slow, and maybe if I had just put the makeup on faster—”

“My love.” He captures her hands with both of his, trapping them tenderly to his chest. “Even if I’d slept for _hours,_ even if you had put on enough makeup to perfectly cover up the mark, I would’ve known what I’d done to you the second I saw you.”

She swallows as she looks in his eyes. “How?” This is important. Maybe important enough to knock over a wall.

He raises his hand slowly to her face, and she doesn’t pull away. He rubs his thumb gently over her cheek, along her cheekbone. She doesn’t breathe.

“They would’ve been gone,” he says quietly. “Your freckles.”

There’s nothing she could have done, after all. The air leaves her lungs in a rush. Her world tips sideways.

_It wasn’t her fault._

“It wasn’t my fault,” she tells him. Wonderingly. It’s an absolution.

Tears spring to his eyes as he wordlessly shakes his head.

“Because no matter what I did, they still would’ve left.”

Her hands reach for his face, and when her fingers find it there’s wetness there, but she can’t see it. He’s just a blur. She looks inside for the wall of anger and she trips over the place where it used to be. There’s only a well. But the tears aren’t there.

Because they’re on her cheeks.

When she realizes it, her sob is a gasp, and when she falls into him, his arms catch her.

She weeps.

She weeps for the little girl who scratched her little-girl hands on those bricks when she started building that wall. She weeps for the woman who was barely a woman, and a chipped glass of carnations and a bag of frozen peas and a bedroom floor. She weeps for boardrooms and barbed wire and the burlap chafe of money. She weeps for him, too. She weeps for them.

His shirt is good at holding tears. His arms are good at holding her.

When the sobs taper at long last, he brushes feather-light kisses on her wet, swollen lips and pulls the blanket from the back of the sofa to cover them both. And when she falls asleep, it’s on his chest.

* * *

Strong arms are cradling her, carrying her up some stairs. She hums and blinks groggily.

“It’s okay, love. Go back to sleep.”

She does.

* * *

She wakes to sunshine and a pillow that smells like love. She’s not in his bedroom, she can tell immediately. The room is fresh and bright and doesn’t feel inhabited in the way his would. He’s not in bed with her, but she’s not afraid. Because all their leaving is over.

The first door she tries is a closet, but the second is a bathroom, and she fills a waiting glass with water from the faucet. She guzzles it sitting on the toilet. She’d forgotten how dehydrating crying was. She sets the glass down by the sink and studies her face in the mirror. Her hair is cowlicked, her eyes are puffy, and ghosts of tear tracks linger at their corners. She touches her freckles lightly and smiles.

“Rey?”

She emerges from the bathroom to find Ben standing by the bed with a heavily laden tray. She sees eggs cooked at least two ways, plus toast and breakfast potatoes and bacon and sausage, and a glass of juice and two mugs. He smiles. “I don’t know what you like to have for breakfast now.” Still feeding her.

She doesn’t answer him, at least not in words. She just slips out of her pajamas and her underwear and stands glowing in the sun. And he knocks over the alarm clock in his haste to set the tray down on the bedside table, because their bodies have needed each other for too long to do any more waiting now.

He pulls his shirt off on the way to her, and she wraps her arms around his shoulders and he wraps his around her back and kisses her like he’s home from war. And he is.

So is she.

“Ben.” She holds his face in her hands and smiles, and he’s so dazzled he forgets to kiss her again, so she reminds him with lips and teeth and tongue. They make it to the bed with difficulty, like the world’s most uncoordinated three-legged race, but when their thighs finally bump the mattress they topple over together, gasping and grinning. And he hurriedly tugs his pants off while she wiggles up to the pillow so she can lie on her back and spread her legs wide for him so the wetness glistening on pink folds can show him the way home.

He crawls up toward her, pausing at her cunt to leave one burning kiss there before he wrenches himself away and positions himself above her, so he can look down at her freckles and her smile and she can look up at his long hair and all the love pouring out from his eyes.

She murmurs quietly when he presses inside. Not surprise, just memory. Recognition. Her cells sing.

“Yes,” she tells him.

“Rey,” he breathes.

And then he begins to thrust, and she forgets to kiss him because she’s too busy holding on, to his back and his arms and the pillowcase, and pressing into his ass and his legs with her feet, and bracing herself against the headboard with one hand so he can push himself as deep inside as they both need, again and again and again until she shudders around him and cries out and gasps through the tears.

“Rey,” he murmurs, between tender kisses to her breasts and neck and face. “My love. My wife.”

One of her legs winds up on his shoulder, and she doesn’t know if she put it there or he did, but he grunts and buries himself so far into her liquid heat that his balls nuzzle the curves of her rear, and then he starts fucking her in earnest, so her breasts jiggle like Jell-o and she wails her completion with every breath. He doesn’t stop after three orgasms. He pulls out and gently thrusts against her hip while he tangles one hand in her hair and fingers her furiously with the other, and her hips lift off the bed with the force of a planted foot when she peaks again in a silent scream.

Still he doesn’t relent, even when her eyes bulge and her mouth hangs open with a trickle of drool from the edge, and her whole body is making wetness for him: tears and saliva and sweat and vaginal cascades to coat his cock and his hand, and who’s dried up? Who’s barbed wire? Not Rey. She’s a waterfall. Life-giving and eternal.

She’s sobbing quietly when he finally reenters her, and he wraps his arms beneath her and presses his self to hers, and it only takes three more rolls of his hips for him to come: just enough time for him to kiss the tears from her freckles.

She cries for a while longer, after, even when he rolls them onto their sides and gathers her into him as close as she can be, and his cock softens and slips out with a wet smear. Not the violent sobs that tug at her lungs, but a warm, gentle rain that makes her smile.

“I’m yours,” he tells her, and it rumbles through his chest to hers.

“Fam’ly,” she murmurs, and he holds her and nods.

* * *

While he goes to remake their breakfast, she sits naked in the morning light and sends two emails. One to her assistant, telling her she won’t be in. One to Hux, asking if he would be willing to have her recommend him to the board as her replacement. She turns off alerts and tosses her phone on the duvet, then takes a shower, and by the time she emerges wrapped in a towel, Ben is coming back in with a new tray.

“What would you do if I dropped this towel right now?” she teases.

He grins. “I’d have to make a whole new breakfast in another half hour or so. And I’m running out of eggs, but _God,_ it would be worth it.”

She giggles as she climbs up on the bed with him, and they feed each other eggs and bacon and English muffins toasted with fresh strawberry jam. And when they’re finished, she sits up against the headboard with a pillow behind so he can sit back against her and she can wrap her arms and legs around him and scratch his chest gently through his t-shirt while he strokes her calves with his big, warm hands.

“You still have the night terrors?” she asks softly, kissing the rim of his ear where it pokes through his hair.

He nods. “Once in a while. I don’t think they’re ever going to go away entirely.” He caresses her knee. “That’s why I put you to bed in here.”

“I know.”

“Do you mind?” he asks hesitantly. “If we can’t sleep together?”

“No,” she says, and means it. Because she knows something that twenty-year-old Rey didn’t know, about the permanence of belonging. “As long as we can eat in the same bed.” She nips his ear with her teeth. “And do other things.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” he chuckles raggedly, and his fingers tighten around her thighs, “we can do _all_ the other things.”

She smooths his hair. They sit in silence for a while, with just the rustle of skin on skin as he strokes her gently, and the scratch of fingernails on cotton.

She says quietly, “I haven’t had a single orgasm in the last ten years, alone or with someone, without thinking about you.”

He laces his fingers through hers, with his palm against the back of her hand, and he brings her hand up to kiss her lifeline. “Were you ever serious with anyone?”

“No. Were you?”

He shakes his head emphatically. “Never.”

She hugs him closer.

“When I missed you too much to bear, I would buy a house. Something small. Just a couple of bedrooms and a fireplace.” She rests her lips on his hair. “I would go to the courthouse and wait in the hall for a newly married couple and give it to them.”

“You would give it to them,” she smiles. “Just like that.”

“Mm hmm.”

“They didn’t think it was a scam?”

“Oh, most did. Then I would tell them my name so they could google it. The Forbes article helped with the credibility.”

She grins. “You told them to google your name? You submitted to being _that_ much of an asshole?”

“It was a great hardship.” He heaves a dramatic sigh, and she giggles. “But it was worth it,” he says seriously.

“How many houses did you give away?” She kisses his shoulder. “How often did you miss me unbearably?”

She can hear his wry smile in his voice. “I don’t know the exact count.”

“What, more than ten?” she presses. “More than twenty?”

“I stopped counting a couple years ago. At two hundred thirty-eight.”

She thought she’d already cried as much as was possible in a twelve-hour period. She was wrong. Salt stings her eyes. “You gave away two hundred thirty-eight houses?”

He clasps her hands in his and shrugs. “I missed you a lot.”

“Ben,” she laughs incredulously, and there are tears mixed in. She unwraps her legs and pushes him up off her, so she can crawl around to straddle his lap. Her towel comes off along the way, but she doesn’t mind. She rests her hands on his shoulders, and he smiles and swipes her freckles with his thumb. “I think we should go to the courthouse,” she says.

“Do you want to give away a house, love? I can call my realtor.”

“We can do that too,” she smiles.

His face lights up gradually as it dawns on him. “Really?” he whispers.

“It’s just that my patient file at my doctor’s office has a form in it with a checkbox marked ‘single,’ and I’d like to be able to correct that if at all poss—”

His hand on the back of her neck is baby’s breath, and his kiss is a carnation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for being here. Truly. ❤️
> 
> I’m on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/CeliaAnd2)!


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